Lord Of War / Epstein / Basketball

Lord of War is an excellent movie. Before you read further, watch this scene. It’s in two parts; life is like that. The first is 5 minutes long the second is under 2 and picks up immediately following. It’s less than 8 minutes total and it’s brilliant:

So why am I posting bits of a seventeen year old movie? Because today Viktor Bout: Russian arms dealer known as the ‘Merchant of Death’ was swapped for Brittney Griner:

Bout – who reportedly has used names including “Victor Anatoliyevich Bout,” “Victor But,” “Viktor Butt,” “Viktor Bulakin” and “Vadim Markovich Aminov” – is thought to have been the inspiration for the arms-dealer character played by Nicolas Cage in the 2005 movie “Lord of War.”

Let’s boil it down to bullet points.

• Viktor Bout was convicted in an American court of law as an arms dealer. By all accounts he’s guilty.
• Brittney Griner was convicted in a Russian court of law of drug violations. No matter what your opinion of drug laws or basketball players or Russia may be, Griner took drugs across the border. She is, was, and remains guilty.
• President Joe Biden, who got more votes than any presidential candidate in history and has more political prisoners in jail right now than any other president since FDR put Americans in concentration camps, traded a guilty arms dealer to Russia so that he could free a guilty basketball player.

I mentioned Epstein because it fits this topic. Epstein’s existence was “resolved” in a way that included missing video evidence. The two guards who were supposedly watching him had the charges against them dropped. His “second in command”, Ghislaine Maxwell, was sentenced to 20 years for trafficking minors to nobody.

Seems legit.

On the same topic, convicted drug kingpin Edgar Valdez-Villareal (a.k.a. La Barbie) is apparently missing.

A cartel leader and hitman fond of videotaping torture sessions and decapitating likely dozens of enemies has gone missing from a federal prison in Florida, where he was serving a 49-year sentence.

If you had asked me a few years ago I would have been less cynical. America, for all its faults, used to more or less follow the law. I would have said; “I’m sure “La Barbie” is still in prison and some dude just misplaced the paperwork that updates the web page. He’ll turn up when they straighten it out.”

Now… it’s different. It’s not just that I see things differently, things really are different. It is simply true that corruption is both more common and more obvious. Absolutely blatant in fact. Now, unlike the past, everyone knows that America keeps political prisoners, trades arms dealers to Russia, and Epstein didn’t kill himself.